You bet dialup still matters. I can’t get broadband, and I live just 2 miles from my mother who CAN get it. And there’s no indication that broadband will get here anytime soon. Broadband is not as ubiquitous as people seem to think it is.
YESSSS Modems DO matter!!!
What happens when your “high speed” goes out?
What if you have a laptop with NO WiFi?
What if you are in an area that can not receive a WiFi signal?
To all the above… YES it is still needed/used.
I have a vintage laptop “all I can afford”, with NO WiFi. My Cable Internet went out for a few weeks. I needed Internet accesss. Lucky I have “Netzero” and a “56k modem”… Saved the day and my bacon.
Is it just me or would this whole thing completely defy the point in high speed connections? If sites are upgraded to be more bandwidth intensive, then everything will begin to sloooooooowwwwww down again. They are only high speed because the bandwidth far exceeds the requirements of most sites. Increase the requirements, decrease the speed. Just a thought.
Yes modems matter. In Houston Tx many houses are “to far” for DSL, or not in SWB (oops I mean ATT) so DSL is $40/month like RR wich is the Cable option in Htown. WIFI? Nope not here. Eihernet MAN no not in the 5th largest City. Netzero Dialup for $6.95? You bet!
Foobar: And now it’s 2006, and you ought to be creating your web sites to work for screen readers and non-standard browsers for blind people and other people who’re reading the site in non-traditional ways. For some sites, that’s not just “ought to”; it’s ADA-compliance. And testing on Lynx is a nice easy way to test for such things.
I find myself a bit annoyed at the basic premise in asking the question, though. “A substantial majority of the people accessing our site are using broadband; can’t we just ignore the rest?” It’s the same argument as, “A substantial majority of the people accessing our site are using Internet Explorer; can’t we just ignore the rest?” What sort of company is happy with turning away 5% or 10% of their potential customers at the door due to something that could be pretty easily changed? And yet companies do it all the time online.
When dialup modem use gets to around 1% of your page hits, then maybe you can think about making a site that’s virtually unusable on dialup.
(Disclaimer: I use Opera, and dialup by choice. So I get easily peeved about this sort of thing – though, really, the sites that won’t work with Opera are far more common than the ones that don’t work with dialup.)
Of course the question about modems is a silly question…it seems irrational that an educated person would ponder if Websites should be taylored to 56K users. The author is probably just throwing a theory out there that he doesn’t himself subscribe to…he just would like some feed back from other thinkers.
I’m a developer with some good website experience…and I still use a 56K at home. I don’t really surf the web…mainly because I don’t have the time and because I don’t have the money to purchase things if I wanted something on a website. Until grocery stores sell produce on the web (assuming cheapper prices and better/same quality) I’ll stick to my neighborhood grocery store.
Besides…I have a good job…but a lot of bills. I can’t afford more than dial up. Although I get a lot better connection at work, I WORK at work and so don’t surf the web there either.
“Other countries are blowing us away with broadband proliferation due to subsidizing high speed internet, just like highways other critical infrastructure. I remember reading in Japan its $10 a month for 10mbps+??? Why are WE not doing this??? Because of crap like the state of Louisiana that actually OUTLAWS free municipal wi-fi (a nice political payback for the big donations from Comcast, etc.)”
Subsidizing something costs money; there’s no free lunch. High speed is so expensive here because it’s a friggin monopoly and the market has no chance to work.
Do modems still matter?? They matter to everyone having to use one be it rural area, or because it is too cost prohibitive to get DSL.
The question itself seems to come from a position of arrogance as my first thoughts were “what are you on drugs?” are you that out of touch or have you played so many online FPS games with Broadband Brats that think EVERYONE can get broadband because that is the only kind of player they ever see?
It never occurs to them that the reason they don’t see modem players much if at all, is simply because the game isnt playable on a 56k modem. I know much more of the internet excludes those who cant get broadband as much of the web content you see today gets has so much rich content it isn’t worth visiting the site.
They advertise it where I live every week I get an introductory offer to Qwest DSL and Cox cable but Cox won’t service this area until Qwest starts penetrating it. Qwest says they won’t be out here till Cox starts service here. Catch 22.
I have been on the waiting list for 8 years and YES America IS the world when it comes to what we lead the world in.
With Microsoft, our Governments Military developing the internet in it’s infancy, IBM, DELL, Apple etc when you think that all that is as American as Apple Pie, conventional wisdom would suggest we would have been a helluva lot further ahead with broadband access then we are. I am not going to have someone “shame” me because there are country’s in the world who can’t get a damn 56k dialup let alone DSL or Cable. The fact is THIS IS one of those country’s and yeah I EXPECT MORE FROM AMERICA. Unless you are on POTS with no other internet access but it sounds like you are one of the “chosen” out there fortunate enough to have broadband and arrogant enough to invalidate us dialup users feelings as “whining”.
First of all, my NOT whining about it isn’t going to get one of those other countrys on broadband internet any faster. No one is expecting it to be a governemnt entitlement moreover I wouldn’t even expect it to be government subsidized.
I DO expect it to be Taxed and under all kinds of federal regulations we will ALL pay for eventually.
That being said, I think of all the costs, whether it be the cost private business brings to bear to extend service to rural areas or that we may be burdened with if Government taxes it,
Falling further and further behind the rest of the world in broadband interenet will have serious ramifications at a cost we will sorely regret.
It’s always cheaper to keep up
then catch up
- Kent Perry, AZ.
Yes, modems matter! We’re redesigning our website and I wanted to determine how high a priority download speed should be given. My boss has dial-up and this is sort of a hot-button issue for her. She said she thought the modem-broadband ratio it was still around 50%. I figured it would be more like 75%/25% in favor of broadband. Did a quick survey of our 100 employees, who represent a good cross section of our target audience, and the ratio came in at 55 to 45 broadband to dial. Those of us who have had broadband for a few years now have developed this blind “Surely almost everyone must have it by now” attitude. 
Yes, for me modems still metter
What a horribly elitist attitude. In American cities, most people have broadband, so just forget about people in rural areas, or in -cough- New Zealand -cough- where broadband is pretty much the worst deal in the OECD. Though, hopefully that will change at some stage.
Of course it matters.
Even in the USA where connectivity lags and is expensive relative to the rest of the developed world (but has a high reach in average). In Cambodia you can get unlimited 3g for $30/month, and the city has had 4G coverage for almost a year now, yet even well-educated professionals can’t afford the $100-150/month that a DSL or cable line costs.
I’ve seen beautiful user experiences that optimize the data, javascript, and html/graphics transferred just because they stuck to the essentials and used caching smartly. Design for the edge and you will have a product that is very robust at the ‘center’. Stop caring about efficiency and performance for lower bandwidth and soon enough, a snappier, simpler UX will emerge from those who do.
If anything, I would encourage more website developers to increase the reach of their internet service by designing user experiences based on conversations that go 140 characters at a time!
Yes, 56k’s still matter, and, yes, the net is getting more and more painful. We live in semi-rural Maine, and any kind of broadband access is still a half mile away from us, and no sign of it (ever) getting closer.
I live in rural southern Virginia and have no choice besides dial-up. There is no cable, cell-phone internet does not cover my area, for satellite internet,I would have to cut down a forest and sign up to pay over $1000 before even knowing if it would work, and no DSL because the phone company refuses to upgrade our area. Also, because of the decrepit old phone lines, I can’t get anywhere near the fastest dialup speed! I can’t watch video online at all, and regular text pages take a very long time to load.
So, although this article was written in 2006,
YES MODEMS STILL MATTER IN 2009!
Do Modems Still Matter?
Yes, they do.
At the end of March 2006, 42% of Americans had high-speed at home, up from 30% in March 2005, or
a 40% increase. And 48 million Americans –
mostly those with high-speed at home – have
posted content to the internet.
Let’s see, US population is about 281.4 million people, 42% works out to 118 million, leaving 163.4 million people out in the cold when sites require high-speed. But wait…
In total, 84 million Americans now have high
speed internet connections at home.
Ah, what’s 34 million people one way or the other?
Well, it’s 28% of the population, not 42%, for one thing. Even in major US markets, there are significant dead zones where high-speed connections are simply not available at any price.
Admittedly, this discrepancy is probably based on current internet users vs total population, but as more and more services move to the net, more and more people will need -very- cheap connections; and dial-up is still often less than one fifth the price of broadband, where available.
And the current chaos over broadband (two-tier or open internet? on-demand web movies and tv or highly restricted DRM-crippled content? pay by the month, minute, content-type, or a combination) indicates to me that this and other factors slowing the adoption of broadband in the US will continue to slow the process.
To my mind, the question isn’t “do modems matter?” It’s more like, “how much to they matter in -my- business plan?”
If you’re pushing on-demand video, not much. If you are pushing shopping, auction, and other services that appeal to the broadest consumer base, I’d say they matter a lot; the value of almost 200 million potential customers without broadband as of right now.
Percentage of home broadband isn’t the whole story. I think two other, perhaps more valuable stastistics would be:
- The percentage of internet users with broadband access (including home, work, and school). We’ve all heard that a huge percentage of personal shopping is done at work; many casual internet users may be content with dialup to check personal e-mail at home as long as they have convenient broadband access elsewhere.
- The percentage of site visits on broadband and dialup. I realize that it’s kind of circular (broadband promotes internet usage), but the point is that many dialup users aren’t that interested in internet usage, so they’re less likely to visit your site. Broadband users are more likely to be advanced internet users, and are more likely to hit your site than dialup users who might just be checking their e-mail every few days. Some people wouldn’t make much dialup if they had it.
Some of those modems must be older: My HST (non-DS) is circa 1991.
I’d find it hard to part with. The HST is a serious piece of hardware. It looks like it would be more at home in a '70s science lab than a '90s desktop.